CONCEPT
The Digital Poorhouse
Virginia Eubanks’s term for the distributed network of eligibility algorithms, predictive risk models, and automated denial systems that perform the county poorhouse’s functions of moral sorting and containment without its walls—at greater speed, larger scale, and behind a screen of mathematical objectivity the original institution never claimed.
The county poorhouse was built of brick; the digital poorhouse is built of data, and the transition is not a break but a continuation.
Virginia Eubanks coined the term to name the distributed system of eligibility algorithms, matching engines, and predictive scoring models that now administer public assistance in the United States—and to insist that this system descends, through traceable institutional lineage, from the nineteenth-century institution whose function was never relief but management: the sorting of the poor into the deserving and undeserving, the conditioning of help on shame, and the making of indigence tolerable to a society that preferred to administer it rather than end it. The physical institution gave way over the twentieth century to what Eubanks documents across three case studies—Indiana, Los Angeles, Allegheny County—each a different design, each producing the same essential outcome: a system that surveil the poor more thoroughly, denies them more